As you may have heard, we’ve recently partnered with Yoco to bring you an integrated payments and point-of-sale system in South Africa. South African small businesses have long battled to get card machines from banks, facing long contracts and rates. Yoco are changing the face of mobile payments so you never miss a sale, offering affordable readers, no contracts and competitive rates.

We’ve rounded up the top three ways payment tech can boost your retail business:

1. Faster checkout, happier customers

The time a customer spends waiting in line to pay can dramatically impact their experience. A recent study indicates that retailers lose 10% of footfall due to queue and wait times in store. Integrated payments speed up the checkout experience so queues keep moving, which is good for you and even better for your customers.

Adam Duxbury and Joshua Meltz, founders of Capetonian swimwear brand Granadilla Swim, know how important it is to provide a speedy checkout experience and say “the integration between Yoco and Vend has halved the amount of time it takes to complete a sale.”

Nicholas Haralambous, founder of sockwear brand Nic Harry, has three stores between Capetown and Johannesburg. Adopting an integrated solution has allowed the team to deliver a great customer experience.

“Working with Yoco through our Vend point of sale is simple and extremely efficient. Switching apps as we’ve had to do in the past wasn’t a sustainable way to complete transactions. Now with the Yoco/Vend integration the customer checkout process is seamless.”

2. Less risk, less fraud

Many South African retailers choose to deal primarily in cash to reduce costs, but you might be surprised to hear that accepting cash payments comes with a high cost, often hidden in labour and time. Managing cash isn’t just costly and time consuming – it also makes your business a target for robbery and theft. Offering mobile payments means less cash on site, reducing costs and risk of theft. Cash is still a hugely popular payment option, particularly in low value transactions, but as the adoption of smartphones and digital payment technologies continue to improve mobile payments will be a game-changer for South African retailers.

3. No more human error

Integrating your POS and payments solution means you’ll free yourself from the time-consuming process of entering and reconciling transaction information. If staff members are making mistakes on either the card machine or POS, this can become an accounting nightmare.

Payments flow directly from Yoco to Vend, eliminating user errors and manual end-of-day reconciliations. This means you can spend less time on payments, and more time focusing on growing your sales and profits.

We are so excited to announce that from today, retailers in NZ and Australia using Vend are able to offer Afterpay in-store.

Afterpay’s buy now, pay later solution is used by over 14,000 merchants in Australia and New Zealand, across large-scale bricks-and-mortar stores and online retailers of all sizes. And its in high demand – processing payments for over 1.8 million customers to date.

But until today, there was no solution available for smaller retailers to offer Afterpay within their physical stores.

Wellington retailer Empire Skate and Street was one of the initial customers to pilot the new integration with Vend. Matt Wells, director at Empire Skate and Street says:

“We are really excited Afterpay is now available, online and in-store. We know it’ll help us offer our customers an even better experience. That’s why we signed up to trial the new integration with Vend and we were happy to be one of the first retailers in New Zealand to do so. We can’t wait for our customers to come in-store and be able to use this new payment option.”

Afterpay allows customers to buy in-store instantly, putting down a quarter of the cost and paying over four equal fortnightly instalments – helping customers manage their monthly budgets. It offers the benefits of a layby service with an immediate take-home option.

To make a sale with Vend’s POS, retailers simply need to scan the customer’s unique Afterpay barcode via a mobile device and the payment feeds straight into Vend, keeping the check-out process quick and seamless for both retailer and shopper. It’s that easy!

We’re excited to share the latest updates to our integration with Shopify, making Vend + Shopify a deeper, more sophisticated omnichannel solution for advanced and multi-outlet retailers.

Firstly, we’ve just released Multi-Outlet Inventory in Shopify. This allows Vend retailers to easily combine and sync inventory from multiple physical outlets and warehouses to sell on their Shopify store. Here’s how Vend retailers can use Multi-Outlet Inventory to sell more in-store and online, seamlessly.

1. Boost sales by ensuring top-selling products in-store are always available to sell online.Retailers can maximize sales across all their channels by selecting popular products from multiple stores to sell on Shopify. With deeper insights into what’s selling best and where, retailers can make informed buying decisions and boost profits across their business.

2. Delight customers and keep them coming back by having in-demand items available to buy online 24/7.Shoppers lead busy lives too, so letting them buy products on their own terms can make their day a whole lot easier. They can happily browse a retailer’s beautiful Shopify store 24/7 and see exactly what’s in-stock, while inventory levels update from Vend to Shopify in real-time!

3. Stay on top of inventory online and offline, all from one place.While running multiple stores, it’s easy to lose track of inventory and see when stock is running low. Luckily Vend’s integration with Shopify can be trusted to ensure retailers only sell stock that is available. Plus retailers can easily view, manage and reorder products all from one place in Vend.

Based on feedback from advanced Vend retailers, we’ve also made experience upgrades so using Vend + Shopify together is even better! Here’s what we’ve changed:

Product publishing and deactivatingPublishing and unpublishing products from Vend to Shopify is now seamless. And if retailers deactivate a product in Vend, it’s instantly removed from their Shopify site.

CSV uploadsBulk uploading products from Vend to Shopify using a CSV is now even smoother, so retailers can add large quantities of stock across multiple channels with ease.

Recording customer detailsManual orders that come from a retailer’s Shopify store without an email address will now also be added as a new customer in Vend. Retailers will just need to ask for an email with their next purchase.

Product price syncingProducts with three decimal prices (e.g. $8.007) experienced some syncing issues which have now been corrected.

And there’s more exciting updates to come for Vend + Shopify in 2017. For further information about using Vend and Shopify together, visit: www.vendhq.com/shopify.

At Vend we aim to give retailers the tools to provide a truly remarkable customer experience. And as modern shoppers increasingly demand ease of purchase and less friction at checkout, being able to offer mobile receipts is now a big part of creating that exceptional in-store experience.

That’s why we work with Star Micronics, a leading provider of sleek and reliable point of sale hardware, such as printers, and proof of transaction technology.

That means you’ll be able to take advantage of Vend’s new integration with AllReceipts – a digital receipt solution that lets shoppers store and manage receipts on their mobile device. Using Star Cloud Services’ Micro Receipt feature, you can provide shoppers in your store with a simple QR code printed receipt (also saving up to 80% in receipt paper) which they can then scan into the AllReceipts app.

Retail staff will be able to serve customers from the shop floor and provide a digital receipt right to their smartphone, without the need to take down customer details. Plus, AllReceipts helps retailers increase engagement with their customers and gather useful data – for example, in the app you can share a survey asking shoppers to rate their experience with you.

One of our totally amazing New Jersey based retailers The Sunglass Menagerie has been using Star Micronics and Vend together in their six store locations, and are seeing big benefits so far:

“Now everything runs so much more smoothly at checkout and we have far better inventory control. It’s comforting to know that we can rely on the system and our printer when making a sale, and our employees really understand and enjoy using it.” Colton Karch, Store Leader.

Star Cloud Services explains it further: “With this new solution, we are offering much more than just a digital receipt service. We are providing tools to help increase customer engagement, and the ability to personalize the customer experience, at no cost to the retailer.” David Sailsbury, VP of Sales and Marketing.

For more information on Star Micronics with Vend, watch the video below! And to see which Star printers work with your Vend POS, visit here.

From today Australian retailers will have more choice in the way they run their business and sell to customers. Vend and Square’s market-leading POS and payments integration, first launched in the US late last year, is now available in Australia. This collaboration brings together two of the best systems for retail today, and provides more options for advanced retailers, those with multiple locations, and complex operations.

Square is one of the world’s leading payments providers, with millions of customers worldwide. Its payment system is popular with Australian small businesses because of the unique payments hardware it provides with options for contactless payments, chip card payments as well as Apple Pay and Android Pay, combined with fast deposits, and powerful analytics and reporting tools.

Matched with Vend’s point-of-sale, which provides sophisticated inventory and retail management for retailers all across Australia, advanced retailers can now run their business more easily and accurately with Vend, while giving shoppers a payment and check-out experience they love.

“Australian retailers are under increasing threat, especially with online competitors like Amazon launching into the market and putting more pressure on local stores. In order to compete they need access to the world’s best tools. Vend helps retailers provide a better customer experience, with an advanced POS and powerful tools to manage inventory, customers, and their business. We launched our partnership with Square in the US last year, and are excited to bring it to Australia,” says Vend CEO Alex Fala.

“Vend is a great product for advanced retail and is a perfect fit with Square. Bringing our joint solution to Australia gives even more retailers access to integrated payments via Square Reader, in a seamless integration that is designed to help their businesses run and grow,”

It’s no secret that smaller retailers face the challenge of their lives against ecommerce giants such as Amazon — and in Britain, this fight has recently been compounded by Brexit and its potential effects on the retail and trade industries.

But there’s hope yet. A recently launched organization called SaveTheHighStreet.org aims to give the power back to high street retailers and local shopkeepers by endowing them with the tools, skills, and digital capabilities they need to compete in the modern age.

Vend has always been about giving the little guys the tools the big guys have, so we found a natural ally in Lyndsay and her initiative. We sat down with the woman behind the idea to get some insights into this grassroots movement; read our interview below.

Where did your inspiration come from for SaveTheHighStreet.org? What drove you to create this campaign?

It was my mom who always made a point to shop local. As I grew up, we saw many small independent shops close, and it was always sad. She used to say it was the end of an era. I’ve always shopped local as much as I can. For the past eight years, I’ve also been working with independent retailers; I can really understand the struggle to set up, succeed, and grow as a local shopkeeper.

Earlier in 2016, I met Alex Schlagman — the founder of PocketHighStreet, a tech platform that helps local shops get discovered and promoted across a network of online publishers. He had loads of insight and close relationships with shopkeepers across London.

I was also spending time talking to shops I knew and to other contacts, and between us, we brought together an initial group representative of the industry. The founding partnerships started to form, with lots of other shops and players from across the industry joining the movement as well.

What’s your ultimate goal? What can we expect to see from you in the coming months? Where do you see SaveTheHighStreet.org in the next few years?

The goal is a stronger high street with more businesses thriving and more diverse shopping — a place where people can go to enjoy their communities. I like to see entrepreneurs living their dreams. It makes people happy, and it’s even better seeing a shop on top of its game: better-connected, skilled-up, and digitally enabled.

It would be great to see all shopkeepers in touch and really leveraging the power of the group. I don’t think many shopkeepers understand the power and influence that come with being part of a group that size. We aim to help over 100,000 shops in 2017.

We want to help challenge the biggest issues shopkeepers face — from gaps in digital capabilities to rates and rents — and to help them find a voice.

SaveTheHighStreet.org founder Lyndsay King

What’s the response been like over the last few months?

Throughout the launch period, hundreds of local shops registered every week. We were flooded with enquiries and messages of support from business associations, solution providers, media, and lots of local people who just wanted to help.

We’ve opened a Retailer Advisory Board to independent retailers nationwide, and lots of shops are keen to benefit from having more of a voice and more insight into our plans and optional publicity.

Why is it so important to “save the high street”?

So important on so many levels!

A world without diverse and thriving high streets is not one I want to live in — and I’m certainly not alone. There are so many dreams, livelihoods, and micro-economies at stake.

Things have never changed as much or as fast as they do today. If our local shopkeepers don’t capitalize on the best skills, tools, and opportunities of the increasingly omnichannel world, they could be further and more deeply disrupted than ever. We need to work to close the gap that’s dividing us.

What is the “connected digital high street”? Tell us about the “blueprint” you’ve created.

Within each pillar, there are loads of opportunities and challenges. We created the Retailer Advisory Board specifically to address this and to create recommendations for successful modern retailing by the retailer for the retailer.

We’re identifying, testing, and sharing with others the things that are working well for actual retailers doing business today.

We share this framework for successful modern retailing for free with all SaveTheHighStreet.org members.

You can also join the Retailer Advisory Board by filling in this questionnaire. Retailer Advisory Board members get extra publicity opportunities, early insight into the programs we’re running through 2017, and the option to get much more involved.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve released a range of exciting features including a shiny new navigation, a revamped Xero integration, advanced user permissions, store credit, cash rounding, and a smoother stock control experience.

We’ve also started working with more amazing partners, like Square in the USA, and we have over 19,000 stores (and counting) using Vend. We have plenty more changes in the pipeline for 2017, and we can’t wait to share them with you at NRF in New York from January 15 to 17!

NRF is the godfather of all retail trade shows, attracting 33,000 attendees for several intense days of learning, networking, and experiencing the latest in retail. More than 500 solution providers representing all angles of retail exhibit alongside the education sessions that cover everything from mobile retailing and sustainability to research and global retail trends.

Now that’s a busy agenda.

Book a time to connect with the Vend team.

Booking a time in advance to chat with us at NRF is a great way to ensure you see and talk to the right people during your busy schedule. Just click on the photo of the person you’d like to connect with, and confirm a meeting time — or email us directly.

Pierre-Emmanuel Perruchot de La Bussière, General Manager Channel and Business Development

Nicola Fahy, North America Marketing

Francesca Nicasio, Content Marketing Manager and Retail Expert

Sean Buckley, Account Executive

Find us at Booth 1413 and Booth 3731.

Thanks to our awesome partners Star Micronics and SpacePole, we’ll be at two locations — so finding us this year will be easier than ever.

See Vend in action, and experience our new look and features, including our advanced user permissions and quick variant setup.

Find Star Micronics at booth 3731 and SpacePole at booth 1413.

Still haven’t registered for your free ticket?

If you’re a retailer but not an NRF member, it’s still your lucky day. Register for your free ticket to access the EXPO Hall by completing a super quick, easy form. Go on: do it now!

Over the coming weeks, there’ll be more announcements and updates. Make sure you follow all the important social channels for networking with attendees.

We’re thrilled to announce that the Vend and Square integration is now available and ready for US-based retailers to use.

Square is a popular payments provider for small business, allowing stores to accept magstripe, chip cards, and NFC payments such as Apple Pay. They can deposit money instantly, and use analytics to view sales trends and boost business performance.

The integration will enable retailers with complex operations or multiple locations, who use Vend’s sophisticated inventory and retail management, to process payments seamlessly with Square. Sales flow directly from their POS to the Square Reader, allowing retailers to run their business more easily and accurately — while giving shoppers a checkout experience they love.

With Vend and Square, it’s easy for retailers to sell more of their profitable products, easily manage multiple stores and channels, and accept every way their customers want to pay — whether that’s out on the shop floor, or in a pop-up store. They can even accept payments while the internet is down.

Because Square is PCI compliant, covers chargebacks, and uses complex monitoring to stop fraud before it happens—it gives retailers that much-needed peace of mind too. With competitive pricing, and fund deposits going straight to bank accounts within 1 to 2 business days, there’s a lot for retailers to gain.

“Using Square payments, I’m saving $500 and 4 hours admin a month. But it’s more than just the time and money — we offer the most beautiful customer experience while knowing the technology just works!”

The integration is now available to US-based retailers. If you’re a Vend customer and want to get more information or sign up, visit: www.vendhq.com/square.

We’re pleased to announce that Vend will soon integrate with one of the world’s leading payments providers, Square.

Square is a popular payments provider for small business as it allows stores to take magstripe, chip cards and NFC payments such as Apple Pay, deposit money instantly, and use analytics to view sales trends and enhance their business performance.

The integration will enable US-based advanced retailers or those with multiple locations or more complex operations, who use Vend’s sophisticated inventory and retail management, to process payments with Square. With this integration retailers will be able to run their business more easily and accurately, while giving shoppers a check-out experience they love.

“Square is a perfect partner for us, with our shared focus on creating a beautiful in-store customer experience. It’s just a great match, and we’re excited to be working together to allow advanced and multi-location retailers to use Square,” said Alex Fala, CEO of Vend.

“We love Vend and we love Square,” says John Waltman, Co-Founder at US-based boutique Katie Waltman. “Vend makes it simple to print barcodes and manage complicated inventory at multiple locations. We’ve used Square for processing in addition to Vend’s point of sale, because it’s easy to learn and train, and it’s reliable. Together, they offer what we’re looking for in a POS/payment processing system and we’re looking forward to the integration.”

This integration also highlights the growing importance of choice and flexibility for retail businesses in the technology they use. Having access to purposefully-selected, world-leading business apps which link together means retailers can choose the best tools for their business and their growth.

“Square is teaming up with best-in-class partners to provide the best experience for sellers. Vend is a great product and this partnership will give more sellers access to payments and financial services to reinvest in their business,” said Francoise Brougher, Business Lead at Square.

The integration will be available to US-based customers in the coming weeks. If you’re a Vend customer and want more information, or to go on the waiting list for updates and exclusive offers related to the integration, visit: www.vendhq.com/square.

It’s been an exciting month here at Vend. We’ve been refreshing our look, released the latest version of our Register for iPad app, and have made even more improvements to our Xero integration. And with the holidays fast approaching, we’ve got some great resources to get you and your staff ready for the seasonal shopping frenzy.

In case you missed it, gift cards are now available on the new Register for Mac and PC, and Register for iPad app. They’re a worthwhile investment for the holidays! Here’s why. Plus, it’s easy to add a new register if you’d like to reduce queues during those extra busy times.

Here’s what else is new in Vend:

We’re refreshing our look –You may have noticed some changes to Vend’s appearance on certain product pages. Everything still works the same, but we’re updating our look to make your experience even better. Find out more.

Xero improvements–We’ve eliminated manual editing of each invoices due date in Xero with customizable payment due dates. You can now set your on-account payment due date in Vend to match your default due date for invoices in Xero. On-account invoices posted to Xero will no longer be due the day they are created. Also, you can now easily edit your customers in Vend and anychanges will automatically sync to Xero. We’ve got lots more great updates coming really soon – posting costs-of-goods-sold from Vend to Xero and bulk account payments are just around the corner.

Register for Mac and PC–Quick Keys for our new web sell screen are here! If you have Quick Keys already set up in our old sell screen, you canbring them over to Register with one click. Have you made the switch to Register yet? It’s faster, more intuitive, and is where you can access all our new features like gift cards and cash management.

Register for iPad v1.6.3 – We’ve just released the latest version of our Register iPad app. We’ve made improvements to secondary receipts, users with restricted access to an outlet will now only be able to see sales for that outlet, and we’ve fixed a rounding issue that was affecting tax inclusive retailers. We’ve also made improvements to barcode scanning making adding products to a sale much faster.

Vend Ecommerce – We’ve added ‘pay later options’ as a new payment type – great for your customers who do not want to pay online with a credit card or if you’re in a location that’s not supported by one of our payment providers. Also, all our themes now support search across your online store, making it easy for your customers to search for products on your website. Finally, we fixed an issue with Paypal Express Checkout and payments being declined because of rounding.

Product Performance Report – If you’ve missed it last month, we’ve introduced a new inventory report that will help you plan your purchases and re-ordering better.Find out more.

New Product Add-Ons:

Collect Automation– Automate your marketing with trigger-based email offers that work seamlessly with Vend. Automatically send an offer on your customers’ birthdays, a welcome offer to new customers, or an offer to win back lost customers who haven’t shopped in a while. Try Automation for free.

Vend U– We’re coming up to retail’s busiest time of year. That means last-minute shoppers, bigger queues, longer hours, and more temp staff.Vend U is here to help your staff learn the systems in your store so they’re fully trained to handle any situation, and to best serve your customers. Here are our latest Vend U courses:

Learn More

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